Jack Hardaway
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What do we do when our world falls apart? The Gospel response is to hope beyond reason.
We begin a short apocalyptic season today, the last two Sundays of the Christian year and the first Sunday of the Christian year. Three weeks that mark the ending and beginning of the Christian calendar. Three weeks about the ending, the completion and the fulfillment of all things. Three weeks to proclaim the mystery of the new beginning of the new creation.
Remember the mystery of faith that we proclaim in the Eucharist, that Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will…come again.
Remember both the Apostle’s and Nicene Creeds, “he will come again to judge the living and the dead.”
Final things, first things and a holy hope that is beyond reason.
How do we celebrate this hope and carry this hope without giving into the destructive paranoia that masquerades as faith? How do we honor this hope without dishonoring it?
Our religious culture is infected with this menacing expectation that God is out to get us, God is dreaded, God is malicious. The unspoken question is who will rescue us from God, or perhaps more accurately from God’s people?
I think the followers of Christ are called to hope in a different kind of judgment. God’s judgment restores all things rather than destroys them. God’s judgment saves rather than punishes, it brings mercy and healing rather than more of the same old vindictive cruelty and neglect. It is something new, not more of the same.
A holy hope, a blessed hope.
The Gospel lesson today, Jesus steers his followers away from being impressed by all the big buildings because everything dies, everything falls apart. He then steers them away from being fascinated and despondent when everything falls apart, as he depicts a world consuming itself.
Don’t be impressed by impressive things. Don’t be depressed by depressing things. Why? Because there is more going on, God can be trusted to bring it all together, have a hope that carries you through it all. Don’t get caught up in the games of the powerful or the suspicion and paranoia of the fearful.
We will have to let go of all that we cling to, our expectations, our fears, our guilt and our blame, we even have to let go of our own virtue as Flannery O’Connor liked to point out. We righteous ones do have a way being impressed by our righteousness.
Scripture has many different ways of speaking about the endings and beginnings of all things. Birth pangs, the approaching day, awakening: the language and imagery trying to express this hope in God fills scripture. We get in trouble when we try to take all these scripture passages from all over the Bible and paste them together into some sort of timeline of the last days. Christians have made and continue to make that mistake over and over again. But I think what holds together this wildly diverse assortment of apocalyptic lessons and verses is the simple hope that God can be trusted, and that time itself belongs to God.
It is a hope that protects us from the vanity of life and carries us through the despair of life. How it all works out is part of the mystery of faith that we can only praise and worship but never fully understand.
Christians end the year and begin the year with the hope that fills time itself, overflowing like a fountain. The hope that fulfills all things, completes all things, and gives purpose to all things.
Hope carries us.
That is the hope that we are called to share, and give, saving those who are lost in vane things and comforting and restoring those whose world has fallen apart.
Rather than despair, violence, fear and indifference we are called to be filled with a lively and living hope that brings the blessing of God.
Everything ends and begins in this hope.